Thomas Paine wrote “These are the times that try men’s souls” in “The American Crisis,” a series of pamphlets he published between 1776 and 1783.
When he wrote the opening sentence to the first pamphlet, the Revolutionary army had just retreated across New Jersey and defeat seemed imminent.
The name of Don Quixote’s horse was Rocinante. The scrawny old horse and its rider appeared in Cervantes’s Don Quixote de la Mancha (1605, 1615).
John Berryman commit suicide on January 7, 1972. He jumped off a bridge into the Mississippi River. He was fifty-eight.
Thomas Hardy published his last novel thirty-three years before his death. Hardy’s last novel was Jude the Obscure (1895), the story of Jude Fawley’s adulterous love for his cousin Sue Bridehead. The novel so shocked readers that Hardy gave up writing fiction and turned to poetry. Hardy died in 1928.
The name of the daughter of Rhett Butler and Scarlett O’Hara in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind was Bonnie Blue Butler. She is killed at an early age in a riding accident.
Will Durant was twelve years older than Ariel Durant. The authors of the multivolume series The Story of Civilization (1935-67) were married in New York City in 1913, when he was twenty-seven and she was fifteen.
Sir Edward Dyer said, “My mind to me a kingdom is” in his 1588 poem of the same name.